Kenya: Pokot women challenge local perceptions

By Stephen Speakman, CWS Eastern Africa

The word Yang'at means "to care" in the local language of the Pokot. For the women and men working with the Yang'at Girl Child Potential Sensitization Group, in Kenya, this mission "to care" is a deeply personal passion.


In 1999, four Pokot women founded Yang'at as an organization dedicated to improve access to education for girls in their home area of West Pokot. All four women had completed their university education, and they understood the importance of education in their lives. Yet, they also understood that in West Pokot most women are not afforded the opportunity to attend school due to a cultural attitude that does not value female education.

In traditional Pokot culture, young girls around the age of twelve are married off to older men after having gone through a female circumcision rite that enters them into "adulthood." Because of this practice of early marriage, and because the cultural attitude that does not value education for women, these girls are unable to continue their schooling. Instead, they are forced to drop out of school to begin their work serving the household. This situation has resulted in high levels of illiteracy among women and a complete lack of access to means of improving their economic status.

Seeing the state of women in West Pokot and knowing the power of education to have a positive impact on a person's life, CWS partner Yang'at decided that something needed to be done within these communities to effect a change. "We started this organization to care about the girl child and women, because they are the most marginalized ones in the district," says Deborah Katina, Yang'at coordinator.


During the dry season, women dig into the sand to fetch the water that the subsurface dam has stored. Photo: Stephen Speakman/CWS

Katina describes the role of women in West Pokot as being like that of donkeys—doing the heavy manual labor such as fetching water from long distances, upwards of ten kilometers in one direction. "Women walk long distances, so they don’t have time for other economic activities," she says. One Pokot woman, Rael Lokoryese, tells of leaving her home at three o'clock in the morning to fetch water. She would leave at three, she says, because the water point was far away. It would take her five hours to walk the twenty kilometers (around twelve miles) necessary to bring water back to her home, and she needed to return to the house with water by eight o'clock so that she could begin to fix porridge for her family's breakfast.

In addition to shouldering the burden of physical labor, women and girls are marginalized in other ways such as by the cultural attitude of men which sees girls only as a source of wealth for the family.

"When a girl is around twelve years old," says Katina, "she goes through female genital mutilation, after which she will be married off immediately. The father will get a dowry after he marries out the girl at twelve years old. He can get thirty or forty cows, so he looks at the girl as a source of wealth."

Water projects have been one way that Yang'at has looked to change these detrimental mindsets and behaviors that lead to women being marginalized within Pokot communities. With funding from Church World Service, Yang'at constructed six sub-surface dams (sand dams) in various locations in West Pokot in 2005 and 2006.

When these dams fill with sand during the flow of water during the rainy season, the sand holds water that otherwise would simply run off or evaporate due to the scorching Pokot sun. With these dams in place, women are able to come to the river bed, scoop into the sand, and find water rather than walking for hours in search of the life-sustaining resource.

In times of severe water shortage, a pipe at the bottom of the dam bed can be opened, allowing community members access to the water stored in the bottom of the dam. As community ownership is a critical issue for all CWS projects, the local people contributed labor and stones for the projects. With project completion, the management of the dams has been turned over to local people who Yang'at trained to handle the project maintenance.

With water close to communities, women and girls who once spent large portions of their day in search of water have time to invest in other ventures such as businesses or attending school. To help women capitalize on this opportunity, Yang'at trains women in small scale income generating activities such as beekeeping and bead-making. The money that the women make is one way to demonstrate to the communities that a woman’s worth is not only in dowry payments or as manual labor. According to Katina, when community members see Pokot women bringing improvements to their communities, they see that girls are important and can do something productive in their society.

When communities see that the project has eased the burden of fetching water and has improved household income, they become more willing to listen to Yang'at's message that women have a valuable role to play in the community. Through sensitization meetings, Yang’at works to encourage communities to change these longstanding cultural mindsets. Yang'at's work shows that Pokot woman can become educated and use their knowledge to benefit the entire community.

The Yang'at staff members, volunteering their time and energy to the people of West Pokot, are living examples of what Pokot women can accomplish when given the opportunity to succeed.

"The members of Yang'at, all of us are from this area—from Pokot," comments Katina. "All of us have gotten our education, and when we are doing this work, we are acting as role models. We are working so that communities can see that women can produce something for their community."

For a more detailed look into the challenges facing one Pokot girl to receive an education, please read "The struggle for education: Selina's story."

Media Contact:
Lesley Crosson, CWS/New York, 212-870-2676; lcrosson@churchworldservice.orgThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Jan Dragin, 781-925-1526; jdragin@gis.net jdragin@gis.netThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

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